Crescent Hill Baptist Church
Crescent Hill Baptist Church
Louisville, Kentucky
Palm / Passion Sunday
April 9, 2006
W. Gregory Pope
WALKING IN THE WAY OF JESUS:
THE WAY OF SERVANTHOOD AND THE CROSS
Mark 11:1-11; Philippians 2:5-11; Mark 8:31-38
What does it mean to walk in the way of Jesus, to live as Jesus lived? That is the question we’ve been trying to answer this Lenten season. Our discovery so far is that the way of Jesus is a way that calls for repentance and conversion on our part, and the intentional commitment to walk as baptized followers of Jesus in the way of love and compassion, grace and forgiveness, peace and justice, simplicity and generosity.
Today we add two more characteristics to the way of Jesus: the way of servanthood and the cross.
Today marks the beginning of Holy Week, also known as the passion of Jesus. Our word “passion” comes from the Latin passio, which means “suffering.” We often think of “passion” differently, as something about which we are deeply enthusiastic. (Marcus Borg and John Dominic Crossan, The Last Week, Harper San Francisco, 2006, viii)
Jesus was deeply passionate about justice for all people, especially the poor and the weak. He challenged the political and religious leaders of his day to defend the poor and include the outcast. He spoke of another kingdom, not one of violence and self-righteousness, but a kingdom of reconciliation and love, where enemies are forgiven and outcasts are included, where all people live together in peace as the family of God.
Marcus Borg and John Dominic Crossan have written a new book entitled The Last Week, which we will be studying at noon each day this week. Borg and Crossan take the two different meanings of “passion” and suggest that it was what Jesus was passionate about that led to his suffering passion, his death on a cross, at the hands of religious and political leaders. (Borg and Crossan, viii)
Jesus is crucified because of our sin, because of our self-centered kingdom of injustice and vengeance. Jesus gives his life in order to reconcile us to God and to show us another way, another kind of kingdom, a kingdom of love and compassion, grace and forgiveness, peace and justice, simplicity and generosity, and self-sacrificing servanthood.
The beautiful Philippians text we heard a moment ago is believed to be an early church hymn to Christ. It is remarkable in its theology. Jesus Christ, sent from God, chose not to elevate himself above others, chose not to use his power to coerce others into obedience. But rather he emptied himself, poured himself out, taking the role of a servant, and giving himself for others, even to the point of death on a cross.
The one human being who had the right to be served by others chose to be servant of all. And any who would follow him must be divested of self-interest and act on behalf of others, in the interest of society’s most vulnerable and most excluded. Jesus lived a life for others, and so must we if we are to walk in his steps.
It’s not a life many of us want to live. Even the church has in some ways taught us to orient our lives around ourselves, teaching us what God can do for us, rather than what God has called us to do. We would rather pursue safety and comfort and protect our way of life no matter what the cost to others rather than take the way of Jesus, serving and living for others.
We have forgotten a fundamental lesson Socrates taught: that the goal of life is not to escape death, suffering, or inconvenience. The goal is to escape doing wrong and to live well with others.
To walk in the way of Jesus requires us to stop thinking of ourselves as the sole center of the universe and to involve ourselves in concerned action regarding the well-being of others.
In the final episode of Seinfeld (The Finale, #169, May 14, 1998) Jerry, George, Elaine and Kramer set off on a trip to Paris. The plane is not off the ground very long until wild and crazy Kramer is struggling to get water out of his ear. He fumbles around so terribly he ends up in the cockpit. The plane takes a nosedive and they wind up landing in the fictional town of Latham, Massachusetts.
Soon after their arrival all four of them witness a heavy-set man being car jacked at gunpoint. None of them makes any attempt to help the victim or to notify the police. Elaine and George crack jokes about the large size of the victim. Kramer videotapes the car jacking, and Jerry doesn’t even pause from his cell phone conversation while the robbery is going on.
Soon after the incident, the “New York Four” are arrested and charged with breaking Latham’s new “Good Samaritan law,” which requires a person to help or assist anyone in danger as long as it is reasonable to do so. Jerry, Elaine, and Kramer are dumbfounded; George is once again immersed in his narcissism. “Why would we want to help someone?” he asks. “That’s what nuns and Red Cross workers are for.”
Thrown into jail and forced to defend themselves, Jerry and company retain the services of Jackie Chiles, a caricature of the real-life Johnnie “O.J.” Cochran, to defend them. To begin with, Chiles claims that the law is deplorable, unfathomable, and improbable. The judge and jury disagree, and the trial goes forward.
Chiles then bases his defense on the premise that his clients did not commit a crime by doing nothing. He argues that you can’t be a bystander and be guilty. Bystanders are by definition innocent. That’s the nature of bystanding. Besides, Chiles suggests, you can’t legislate morality. You can’t make people be good. In the United States, he says, you don’t have to help anybody. That’s what this country is all about. Again, the judge and jury disagree, and the New York Four are convicted of violating Latham’s Good Samaritan Law. (Al Gini, Why It’s Hard to Be Good, Routledge, 2006, 73-74)
Al Gini, who reminded me of that episode, is Professor of Philosophy at Loyola University of Chicago. In his book Why It’s Hard to Be Good, he says that according to Jesus’ parable of the Good Samaritan, attention must be paid to those in need. “Something must be done. Doing nothing is something. Doing nothing makes us co-responsible. It is allowing and permitting the situation to happen. It is sanctioning the nongood by doing no good, no thing. In fact, to do nothing is to assist in the deed. As William James famously suggested, ‘The only thing necessary for evil to prevail is for good [people] to do nothing.’”
One ethicist put it this way: “The exclusive pursuit of one’s self-interest is not a prescription for conduct in the marketplace; for no social, political, economic, or moral order can survive that way. Some measure of caring, sharing, and being our brother’s and sister’s keeper is essential . . .’” (Amitai Etzioni in Gini, 77-78)
Jesus would agree. He was seen as a threat to the religious and political order of his day because he called them to their true purpose, not with coercive force but with the persuasive power of love and compassion for all who are in need, grace and forgiveness toward the sinner and the enemy, peace and justice for the weak and most vulnerable. But rather than listen to Jesus, church and state colluded to kill him. It was his cross.
It is to be our cross too. “If any want to be my disciples,” Jesus said, “let them deny themselves, take up their cross and follow me.”
To take up our cross, as we walk in the way of Jesus, is to willingly, voluntarily, out of love for God and neighbor, take up the sufferings of others as a calling to service and ministry. To take up our cross is to allow the sufferings of others to become our suffering, just as Jesus did.
To walk in the way of Jesus requires us to transcend our narrow self-interest and make a decision to reorient our lives, to take a stand with the weak and powerless of the world against the strong and powerful oppressors.
This is something we strongly resist - to willingly, knowingly, enter into the sufferings of other people. We have enough suffering, thank you. It is usually not something we are willing to do. But it is something we must do if we are to walk in the way of Jesus. It is the call of Christ upon our lives. It’s what Dietrich Bonhoeffer, whose life and writings we’ve been studying this Lenten season, led by Frank Woggon - it’s what Bonhoeffer called “the cost of discipleship.”
Bonhoeffer took up his cross when he took on the sufferings of his German people, especially the suffering victims of Hitler’s policies.
Hitler chose to exterminate all who did not exhibit good Germanic values and the genetic purity of the German race: Jews, gypsies, homosexual men, and others. Six million Jews were murdered including one and a half million children; 12-15,000 homosexual men were murdered, along with thousands of gypsies and countless others (including Christians who opposed Hitler) - all those who were deemed expendable.
This is why our words regarding Jews, gay persons, Muslims, and all who may be labeled as different must be measured carefully. It is also why we can never simply sit on the sidelines when nations - our own or any other nation - perpetrates evil against select groups of people.
Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel writes in The Town Beyond the Wall, “This was the thing that I wanted to understand ever since the war. Nothing else. How a human being can remain indifferent. . . . Those who were permanently and merely spectators - all those were closed to me, incomprehensible.” (As quoted in Gini, 78)
In the Divine Comedy, Dante said, “The hottest places in hell are reserved for those who, in a period of moral crisis, maintain their neutrality.” (As quoted in Gini, 62)
A turning point for Bonhoeffer was the night of November 9, 1938, called Krystallnachte, the Night of Broken Glass. That was the night the hidden and unofficial violence against the Jews turned open and official. Hitler gave orders for Jewish synagogues to be destroyed. There ensued a rampage of violence against Jewish holy places, homes and businesses. Synagogues were destroyed, holy books burned, people injured, killed, and deported. That night Bonhoeffer opened his Bible and read Psalm 74:
O God, why dost thou cast us off forever? . . .
Thy foes have roared in the midst of thy holy place.
They have set up their emblems there. . . .
They burned all the meeting places of God in the land . . .
How long, O God, is the foe to scoff?
Bonhoeffer read the psalm and then wrote in the margin of his Bible: “How long, O God, how long . . . shall I be a bystander?”
Bonhoeffer left a prestigious teaching position and spent the next four years of his life working against the brutal policies of Hitler on behalf of the Jewish people of Germany.
On April 5, 1943, Bonhoeffer was arrested for helping Jews escape to Poland during World War II and the Holocaust. He was later found guilty in a failed conspiracy to assassinate Hitler. On April 5, 1945, Adolf Hitler personally signed the order of execution. On April 9, sixty-one years ago today, Dietrich Bonhoeffer was hanged. He was 39 years old.
The calling of Christ to deny self, take up our cross and follow him is a calling that will not let us be bystanders. If we are to follow Christ, we must follow him into the lives of those who are forgotten, hated and excluded, as well as those who are sick, dying and grieving. If we do not, we cannot call ourselves Christian. To be Christian is to refuse to be a bystander. It is to enter into the suffering of the world with the redemptive hope and justice of God.
The life Jesus lived and the life he calls us to live is a cruciform life, a life that takes the shape of a cross, a life lived with arms outstretched offering love and reconciliation to the world. But beware, like Jesus, those outstretched arms may end up nailed to a piece of wood, and you may be called to die because of that love. To quote Bonhoeffer, “When Jesus bids a person to follow, he bids them come and die.”
That’s why the cross is the central symbol of the Christian faith. It reminds us of God’s suffering love for the world and the forgiveness our sin. It also reminds us of the cost of following Jesus. If we want the road to safety and comfort, then we better choose another path than the one Jesus walked. The way of the cross is the way of taking on the suffering of others as a calling to ministry.
If we take the way of the cross and share in the sufferings of others, we will sometimes feel as if we are drowning in the sorrows of the world. But if we join with others in community and ask God for the strength and courage to endure for the sake of others, we will find ourselves in the high and holy company of Jesus, servant of all, who gave his life for us all.
More than anything, I think walking in the way of Jesus is this: To bow before the cross and embrace the love of God, then turn and offer that love to the world through our very lives, singing, singing as we go:
Were the whole realm of nature mine,
That were a present far too small;
Love so amazing, so divine,
Demands my soul, my life, my all.
Amen.
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CRESCENT HILL BAPTIST CHURCH
2800 Frankfort Avenue
Louisville, Kentucky 40206
(502) 896-4425
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